The Garner Files: A Memoir

by James Garner

  I told him I was willing to take that chance.

  Everybody around me told me I was crazy. Except Lois, who said she’d be fine with whatever I decided. But everyone else said, “Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” My manager, Bill Robinson, told me, “Let it go; you’ve won!”

  I chewed on it, and I finally realized they were right.

  On March 23, 1989, we settled the case “on the courthouse steps.” As part of the settlement agreement, I promised not to reveal the amount Universal paid me. I’d sued them for $22.5 million—$7.5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitives. My legal fees were about $2.2 million. It’s been reported that I walked away with anywhere from $9 million to $20 million. I can’t legally comment on that, but I can say that for a week or two afterward, Lois had to keep telling me to wipe the grin off my face, and that she drew a big “V” for victory in lipstick on our front door that stayed there for a year.

  The studios have always tried to get whatever they can by any means necessary. Their attitude is, if you want what’s yours, you’ll have to come and take it from them. They get away with it because people don’t complain. If more actors and independent producers fought them, I think the practice of creative bookkeeping would be far less pervasive. So my advice to anyone in a similar position is to fight them. What’s yours is yours, and you should go after it. My lawsuit proved that you can beat the system if you’re determined enough. I think it also sent a message to future business partners that I will not be diddled, and to that extent it may have discouraged some people from doing business with me. They figured, “I don’t want to get with him because if we try to steal, he’s going to catch us.” Well, good riddance.

  I’ll tell you something funny, though: not two weeks after we settled, a messenger arrived at the house with two scripts, and one of them was from Universal.

  No hard feelings, I guess.

  When I was making Rockford episodes, I used to love to get up and go to work every day. I was awake before the alarm went off. I was always the first one on the set in the morning and the last one to leave at night because I enjoyed it so much. And I wanted to experience that again.

  Making TV movies is a little like formula car racing, where you have strict limits on the engine, transmission, suspension, aerodynamics, even the tires. The idea is to get everybody competing on a level playing field and then see who’s smart enough to develop a winning formula. Compared to feature films, TV movies have lots of restrictions, too. They run as long on the screen as features, but you have to make them in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. I loved that challenge. I wanted to see if I could shuffle all the elements and produce good films under the circumstances. That’s why I decided to make the two-hour Rockford movies.

  And for the money.

  Beginning in 1994, we made eight Rockford movies. I tried to keep my production company as far away from Universal as possible. I told the studio people when we were negotiating that if I had to drive onto that lot every day, it would be like sticking a knife in my ribs. There were no accounting problems because it was cash and carry: they gave me the money, I gave them the film. In that order.

  We chose CBS over NBC because CBS promised us the time slot after Murder, She Wrote on Sunday nights. We figured Angela Lansbury’s audience would stick around for us, and we were right: the first Rockford movie, I Still Love LA, was the highest-rated TV movie of the 1994–95 season.

  Rockford did to the television detective what Maverick did to the TV cowboy: back in the 1950s, there were fifteen cowboy shows and Bret Maverick knocked them all off. Then Jim Rockford came along in the ’70s with his tongue in his cheek and wiped out all the detective series.

  I guess I have a knack for killing genres.

  The Polaroid instant camera was invented in the 1950s by Edwin Land, a physicist who was inspired when his three-year-old daughter asked him why she couldn’t instantly see a photo he had taken of her. The camera was popular all through the 1960s and ’70s. In 1977, Polaroid introduced the One Step, the latest in a line of cameras with self-developing film. In those days, it was a big deal to get a photo in sixty seconds rather than waiting days to get film developed.

  I was doing Rockford when Polaroid approached me. I’d had several offers to do commercials, some for more money, but I chose Polaroid because they did things right and weren’t stingy with production dollars. And I wanted to see if, later in life, I could have a hit television series, do the occasional movie, and make commercials as well.

  And for the money.

  I had a lot of fun doing them.

  I’ve been asked a hundred times about the “stigma” of doing commercials. Well, I’m an actor. I hire out. I’m not afraid of hurting my image. I figured if Henry Fonda, Laurence Olivier, John Wayne, and Orson Welles could do commercials, so could I.

  If you do it right, you don’t demean yourself by selling a product, and you can be just as good in a commercial as in a feature film. I was selective: I wouldn’t do commercials for beer, bug spray, or underarm deodorant. I did Mazda commercials, I was the spokesman for the Beef Industry Council (“Beef: It’s what’s for dinner!”) until I had heart surgery to relieve blocked arteries. In a Chevy Tahoe commercial, I recited a poem called “Nobody Knows It but Me” that sounded like Walt Whitman or Robert Louis Stevenson but was actually written by copywriter Patrick O’Leary. I didn’t want to be a pitchman because I don’t believe in the hard sell. With Polaroid, I didn’t want to get into technical details, either. I just wanted to entertain the audience and leave them with a good feeling about the camera.

  I wanted the commercials to be at least as entertaining as the programs they interrupted, and I told the Polaroid people that I didn’t ever want the humor to wear thin. That’s why we made so many of them, about 250 over a five-year period. I didn’t want viewers to see a given commercial more than a few times.

  The first one with Mariette Hartley was in 1977, and our collaboration would last for almost six years. Jack Dillon, from the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency, wrote all the scripts. Mariette and I may have occasionally added something or moved things around a little, but for the most part the writing was so good we didn’t have to change a thing. (Jack was a fiction writer as well, with over a hundred short stories and half a dozen novels to his credit.) Jack’s spots were short and sweet.

  We had a good thing going. Mariette is a wonderful actress and we got along well. They’d hired her for one day and we clicked immediately. With her deadpan delivery, we fell into a kind of “Bickersons” back-and-forth banter. She’d say it’s black and I’d say it’s white and she usually had the last word:

  JG: Polaroid’s One Step is the simplest camera in the world. You just press one button.

  MH: How many does it have?

  JG: One.

  MH: Then that’s all you can press.

  JG: This is Polaroid’s new Time Zero One Step.

  MH: Pretty. Why is it black?

  JG: So you’ll know it’s the Time Zero One Step. And here’s the world’s fastest developing color [takes her picture]. You see it in seconds now, not minutes.

  MH: Look at that color! But why a “Time Zero” One Step?

  JG: It comes with a pack of Time Zero Supercolor film in this made-for-each-other pack.

  MH: Certainly are made for each other.

  JG: Just like coffee and cream . . .

  MH: Rolls and Royce . . .

  JG: Or me and you.

  MH: Try ham and cheese.

  The chemistry was so great, in fact, a lot of people thought we were married in real life. Probably the ones who thought I was really Maverick. (The same thing happened after the success of Mrs. Miniver in the 1940s. The studio got thousands of letters urging Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other.) It got so bad that Mariette had a T-shirt made that said, “I am NOT Mrs. James Garner.” When Mariette’s daughter Justine was born, she got ano
ther T-shirt saying, “I Am NOT James Garner’s Baby.” Then I saw a woman on the street wearing one that said, “I Am NOT Mrs. James Garner, Either.” The whole thing didn’t make Lois too happy, so I got her one that said, “I’m the REAL Mrs. James Garner.”

  After a year, they were still paying Mariette scale. I felt they needed to make a better deal with her, because it just wasn’t right for me to be making so much more than she was. So I did a naughty thing: I called her and told her all about it. Then she did a naughty thing and stuck it to them pretty good. But Polaroid sold a ton of cameras and everybody wound up happy.

  Making those commercials with Mariette was a wonderful experience. I consider them a high point in my acting career. During that period, Mariette also did a Rockford episode. We were at Paradise Cove shooting a scene in which we kiss, and a photographer hiding in the bushes with a long lens snapped us and sold the photo to the tabloids, which passed it off as a real kiss. It caused a commotion at home for both of us, I can tell you.

  I was never a photography bug, but when Polaroid introduced an instant movie camera, I brought a prototype with me on a golfing trip to Scotland. I took movies of everything I saw and did over there, thinking we might use them in future commercials. But none of the movies came out. The film speed was so low, everything turned out dark and blurry, so Polaroid never did well with the camera. And as digital photography made the instant camera obsolete, the company filed for a series of reorganizations and finally went out of business.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Golf

  The first time I played golf was in Texas, in the snow, while on tour in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Playing town after town on our way across the country, we did a lot of short hops in the bus. During the day, we’d go out and play the local muni course, sometimes in deep snow, with a red ball. We were just goofing around.

  I didn’t start playing seriously (only a golfer would put those two words together) until the late 1950s, after I’d signed with Warner Bros. I played every day I wasn’t shooting a picture or making a Maverick episode, usually at Griffith Park, one of LA’s busy public courses.

  I didn’t take lessons; I learned to play by observation. When my brother Jack moved to California, he helped me with this and the other, and I got better because of him. Years later John Cook gave me some pointers as well, and Gary Player once gave me a great putting tip. That’s about the only real instruction I’ve ever had. Of course, like most golfers, I always kept my ears open for tips about the golf swing, what Bel-Air pro Eddie Merrins calls “bootleg lessons.”

  Golf is the most competitive game I know. You’re playing against yourself as well as your opponents. It’s an endless quest for perfection that you’ll never achieve. It can be a punishing game, especially for a pessimist like me.

  Mac Davis loved to kid me about it, and I admit my attitude wasn’t the best. Whenever I’d hit a shot that looked like it might be out of bounds, I was always certain it was, and I’d say, “Shit, it’s OB!”

  “Be positive!” Mac would say.

  “Okay, I’m positive it’s out of bounds!”

  Mac and I started playing golf together at the Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Both of us were five or six handicappers, and we got to be pretty much a pair around the club. We played four or five days a week in a regular match with a bunch of other guys. We’d square off into foursomes, so Mac and I would be opponents one day, partners the next.

  Mac’s wife, Lisë, a former nurse, is one of the nicest people I know. I didn’t meet her through Mac, though; she and I met when they took me to Cedars-Sinai with twelve broken ribs. I’d been filming a scene on a mechanical horse for an episode of Bret Maverick. The guy who was running it hadn’t done it before and he threw me fifteen feet. I managed to duck my head before I hit, but landed on my left rib cage and broke ’em all.

  In addition to being sweet, Lisë is gorgeous. When I woke up in the hospital, the first thing I saw was her radiant face, this beautiful angel looking down at me. I literally thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

  One of the great things about golf is the camaraderie. In addition to my friendship with Mac Davis, the game really glued Bill Saxon and me together and gave us something to do besides sitting around talking about the old days in Norman. Since Lois didn’t like to travel, whenever I’d get an invitation for me and my wife, I’d say, “My wife can’t make it—can I bring my friend?” (Lois loved that I played golf because it got me out of the house. She never complained that I played too much or that she was a “golf widow.” She doesn’t play. I wouldn’t let her.)

  When we started playing together, I had to give Bill Saxon two strokes a side. His swing wasn’t great, but he’s strong, like an old country boy, and he hit the ball far. He improved steadily and we ended up playing even. Now that I no longer play, I sit on the sidelines cheering him on as he shoots his age every other day. As of this writing, he’s done it more than a hundred times.

  I shot my age when I was seventy, and it was one of the biggest thrills I’ve had in golf. I can’t prove it, but I bet it’s rarer than making a hole in one. It takes skill, good luck, and, of course, longevity. (It’s the one athletic accomplishment I can think of that requires it.) But mere life span isn’t enough, because shooting your age, like getting old, isn’t for sissies. Most of those who do it are good athletes who’ve been playing golf for decades. They’ve managed to avoid major injuries and illnesses and have learned to play through the minor ones. Most of the golfers who consistently shoot their age were good players in their younger years.

  During the 1970s, Bill Saxon and I must have played in a hundred PGA Tour pro-ams. I’d get an invitation and would ask to bring Billy Dee along and we’d hop in his jet. My brother Jack would often join us. He taught Bill a lot about the game and sometimes caddied for him.

  We played a lot with “super seniors”—guys like Dow Finsterwald, Tommy Aaron, Gene Littler, Bobby Nichols, Don January, Phil Rodgers. I got to meet and spend time with Byron Nelson, one of the nicest men I’ve ever known.

  One of the most memorable rounds was at Champions Golf Club in Houston with Jackie Burke and Jimmy Demaret. Jimmy was a great player, but he was also a snappy dresser, a singer, and a raconteur who entertained in clubs along the tour. He was one of the first golfers to become a TV commentator, on Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf. Oh, and he somehow found time to win thirty PGA Tour events, including three Masters titles. All the more remarkable when you consider that he rarely practiced because, as Dan Jenkins said, “it cut into his party time.”

  “Mister Dee-muh-ray,” as I called him, had a wonderful disposition, was fun to be with, and was something of a philosopher: he once pointed out that “golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.”

  In the early 1960s, golf was beginning to take off on television, mostly thanks to Arnold Palmer’s dashing style of play. The networks began broadcasting tournaments live, the pros were beginning to make more prize money, and it was the dawn of the age of endorsements.

  Charles Coody, Gene Littler, and Tommy Aaron were among the first endorsers. They rigged a deal to wear a goofy hat with the Amana appliance logo in the middle of it. They got fifty bucks every time they appeared on television wearing it. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that appliances had nothing to do with golf. The Amana company would also fly the pros to Iowa to play in a tournament in return for a discount on freezers.

  Arnold Palmer was the first to have his own brand, with the umbrella logo on everything. Look what blossomed from that: now PGA touring pros are covered with almost as much advertising as NASCAR drivers.

  In the early 1960s, I played against Sam Snead on a TV show called Celebrity Golf. Each week Snead took on a different entertainer in a nine-hole match. Some of Snead’s other opponents on the show were Perry Como, Dean Martin, Bob Hope, Robert Wagner, Randolph Scott, and Ray Milland. Though our match was on a course I’d never played before, Bre
ntwood Country Club in Los Angeles, I managed to make four pars and two birdies to tie Snead. Or rather, he tied me. He had to eagle one hole and sink a forty-foot putt on another to do it. He wasn’t happy about that, I can tell you. Snead was a curmudgeon and full of himself. I think he had the first nickel he ever made. But he could play.

  Bill Saxon and I once played with Dan Jenkins in an LPGA pro-am in Las Vegas. Bill took a practice swing and accidentally hit me in the head with his driver. It didn’t hurt me, but I played it to the hilt, dropping to the ground, pretending to be unconscious. It gave Dan quite a start until he realized I was acting. Said he thought he’d witnessed James Garner being murdered by his best friend.

  When we were making a Rockford episode in the mid-1970s, Tom Selleck reminded me that we’d first met years before, at Joe Kirkwood’s nine-hole golf course in the San Fernando Valley. I used to jump over there from the studio when I was doing Maverick. One day Tom, then still in his teens, was playing the course and he almost hit me with a golf ball. I’d forgotten the incident, but Tom told me I slowly turned and said, “I believe the expression is ‘Fore!’”

  One year Saxon and I played in a tournament in Tucson where we each won a gross of Ram golf balls. Forgetting the tournament was sponsored by Ram, I asked if I could have Titleists instead. Bill pretended he didn’t know me.

  I played with President Clinton at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Someone had presented him with several drivers made of metal from a Russian satellite, of all things. The president gave me one of them, and I was of course honored to receive a gift from the president of the United States. I was leaving town the next morning, so I took the driver back to my hotel, packed it in my golf bag, then zipped up and locked the outer travel bag. While lying in bed watching TV that night, I received a call from the president. He asked me if I’d remembered to take the driver. I said I was sure I had, but I told him to wait a minute while I looked. I put down the phone, went to the closet, unlocked and unzipped the bag and confirmed that the driver was there. As I returned to the phone, I realized I’d just put the leader of the free world on hold. I got back on the line and told him I had the driver. I thought that would end the conversation, but the president kept talking, and we chatted about this and that for what seemed like twenty minutes until it dawned on me that he’d called just to chew the fat. I don’t know what came over me, but I blurted out, “Pardon me, Mr. President, don’t you have anything better to do than talk to me?” He had a good laugh at that. Luckily. I never used the satellite driver, by the way. I think it’s still in the garage.